Quelle:
PATRIOT MISSILES
Friendly-fire
cases draw new scrutiny to system
By Ross Kerber, Globe Staff, 4/16/2003
After the Gulf War, critics forced the Pentagon to acknowledge that its Patriot missile-defense system wasn't as precise as officials had claimed.
Now, some Patriot missiles have proven all too accurate. US Central Command Monday said early indications suggest a Patriot missile shot down a Navy F/A-18 over Iraq on April 2, which would be the third friendly-fire incident involving the defensive system since March. The jet's pilot was listed as killed in action Sunday after the wreckage was found. In an earlier case, two British pilots died.
Though not all the facts are in, the Patriot system built largely by Raytheon Co. of Lexington had seemed to be proving itself in other operations. Patriot batteries operated by coalition forces intercepted and knocked down nine of the nine incoming missiles they engaged, according to Army officers. That performance, the officers said, provided critical protection to soldiers and civilians in Kuwait City and other potential targets. Between six and nine other missiles fell harmlessly in the sea or desert, US officers said.
But the friendly-fire cases put the system under a new round of scrutiny. Already, the software that operates the Patriot in ''automatic engagement mode'' is under review, and the Air Force has changed its combat procedures so pilots double-check their targets when attacking near Patriot batteries. To date, Centcom hasn't released much data about any of the Patriot's engagements, and the Army and the Pentagon's top missile-defense officer have offered conflicting accounts of the number of Patriot missiles fired, perhaps reflecting their different ambitions for the system.
''A dozen years ago the problem was it was missing its targets,'' said Loren Thompson, defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Washington think tank. Now, although little information has been released to judge the Patriot's overall success, ''You had better be careful where you're aiming,'' Thompson said. ''One thing we know for sure is that nothing got past the Patriot.''
What went right and wrong with the Patriot is of keen interest to the missile defense community, since the system's ''hit-to-kill'' technology reflects a broader missile-defense effort. In the Gulf War of 1991 military officials initially claimed a near-perfect record in downing Iraqi Scud ballistic missiles, then reduced Patriot's estimated success rate to between 40 percent to 70 percent in the face of detailed analysis by outsiders such as physicist Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Since then, the Pentagon has upgraded the Patriot radar and an interceptor missile known as PAC-2 built by Raytheon in Andover. Lockheed Martin Corp. makes a newer, smaller missile known as PAC-3, designed to ram into its target rather than exploding nearby like the PAC-2.
The Army deployed an undisclosed number of Patriot batteries to protect forces in Iraq and Kuwait against the Iraqi missile threat, mostly a mix of solid-fueled Ababil-100 missiles and liquid-fueled al-Samoud missiles. Both present simpler targets than the longer-range Scud missiles Iraqis fired during the Gulf War.
According to Army spokesmen, Patriot batteries operated by Army troops engaged and intercepted six Iraqi missiles since March, and Kuwaiti-manned batteries shot down three more. Eight of the nine incoming rounds were ''destroyed in the air,'' the command says; the other was ''significantly damaged'' and hit the ground harmlessly. The other Iraqi missiles weren't engaged by defenders because their trajectories sent them to land in the desert or ocean. Another Iraqi missile, probably a low-flying Silkworm, landed in Kuwait City on April 27, causing some damage, but no injuries. Officers fire two Patriots against each incoming threat under standard Army doctrine.
The Army won't release many technical details about the engagements, citing operational security. Testifying to Congress April 9, Lieutenant General Ronald Kadish, director of the Pentagon's missile-defense agency, said the Army fired four PAC-3s but mostly used PAC-2s. The newer missiles weren't used exclusively because ''we just don't have enough of them,'' Kadish said.
Army officers won't back up Kadish's figures. In an e-mail last week, an Army spokesman in Kuwait, Captain Henry Vasquez, said the number given by Kadish is ''incorrect'' but wouldn't say more except to confirm that a mix of Patriot types were fired. In an interview, MIT's Postol said that Kadish may be anxious to tout the Patriot's success as a validation of missile-defense concepts such as hit-to-kill, while the Army is being more cautious.
''I think the Army is probably trying to avoid embarrassment from making one set of claims and having another set of facts come out,'' said Postol, a frequent critic of the missile-defense efforts. ''Kadish doesn't care about those sorts of things.''
A spokesman for Kadish's office noted that Kadish had said in his testimony that the analysis was still ongoing.
The exact causes of all three friendly-fire incidents are still under investigation, and flaws in the ''identification friend-or-foe'' equipment and procedures used by the pilots to determine whether to target an aircraft may be responsible. At the least, the incidents reflect communications breakdowns between the Patriot's Army crews and pilots from three other armed services.
In the first case, authorities confirmed a Patriot missile shot down the British Tornado on March 23 as it returned from a bombing run over Iraq. Some wonder why the Patriot crew fired at any aircraft since the Iraqi air force got no planes aloft. ''Turning on the auto-fire where the vast majority of the aircraft overhead are known to be friendly is asking for trouble,'' Thompson, of the Lexington Institute, said.
The automatic setting may have played a role in the next incident as well. On March 25, a US F-16 fighter fired on a US Patriot battery about 30 miles south of Najaf, Iraq. Officials wouldn't say more, but Victoria Samson, a researcher at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, said she was told by a defense-industry executive the F-16 fired a missile that destroyed part of the Patriot's radar trailer after it ''painted,'' or electronically identified, the jet. Noting reports the Patriot had been left in an auto-fire mode, Samson speculated the F-16's pilot was nervous after the Tornado attack. ''The pilot saw he was being painted by the radar beam and decided not to take a chance,'' she suggested. No injuries were reported.
The last case occurred April 2 when a Navy F/A-18C Hornet attack plane went down over central Iraq. On Sunday the Pentagon changed the status of the plane's pilot, Lieutenant Nathan D. White, 30, of Mesa, Ariz., from ''unknown'' to ''killed in action'' after the plane's wreckage was found and White's body recovered, said a Pentagon spokeswoman.
''First indications are, it looks like it may have been a Patriot that brought the aircraft down,'' said Lieutenant Josh Rushing, a Centcom spokesman, speaking by telephone from Qatar. He declined to be more specific.
By Andrea Stone, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — As U.S. forces pile up victories in Iraq and war planners rate how their military hardware worked, one weapon that failed miserably during the Persian Gulf War of 1991 has proved, once again, to be a disappointment.
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The Army's Patriot air-defense missiles — sent to Kuwait and Iraq to knock down Iraqi missiles — apparently have downed at least two allied fighter jets and almost brought down a third since fighting began more than three weeks ago. The incidents have prompted calls to stop using the controversial missiles until investigators figure out what went wrong.
"Overall, the performance of the Patriot has been negative," says Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. "They should be standing the Patriots down until we understand why it's shooting down planes."
U.S. Central Command says the Patriots, which had a dismal record in the last Gulf War, have improved to the point where they intercepted nine of the Iraqis' short-range al-Samoud 2 and Ababil-100 missiles in this conflict.
Even so, critics say the Patriots' apparent role in what may be the U.S. military's first downing of combat aircraft by its own air-defense missiles raises serious questions. More troubling is that the Army observed potential problems as long as three years ago, during an exercise in Georgia, when Patriots "shot down" several friendly aircraft.
"People are starting to ask whether the Patriot is up to snuff," says Victoria Samson, a missile-defense expert at the Center for Defense Information, a Pentagon watchdog group based in Washington. "Can it determine friend from foe?"
Investigators are asking that and other questions in three incidents:
U.S. Central Command spokesman Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said Iraqi surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles had been fired in the area where the Hornet was flying. That suggests a Patriot might have been firing at an Iraqi missile and hit the Hornet instead, or that an Iraqi missile might have hit the Hornet.
Another U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, "It is possible it wasn't a Patriot. But we think it was. We're just not sure yet."
Army spokesman Col. Rick Thomas in Kuwait declined to comment while the incidents are being investigated. "Any discussion of possible scenarios would be speculative, and I'm not willing to do that," he said.
At a Senate hearing Wednesday, Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, head of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, said the accidents may have been caused by both procedural and design flaws in the aircraft and ground systems that distinguish between friend and foe. However, Kadish said, there was no evidence yet of a radar or communications failure. He said overall, the performance of the Patriot has been "very, very good."
Dominating the skies
Others say the incidents are inexplicable given the U.S.-led coalition's dominance of the skies above Iraq. One Iraqi jet has dared to take off during the conflict, and it landed again almost immediately.
Critics say whether the Patriots were on automatic or under direct operator control, they never should have been allowed to target aircraft. "The Patriot really has no business firing at aircraft. There simply were no hostile aircraft threatening U.S. troops," Cirincione said. "Why the Patriots were taking that on as a mission is a bit of a mystery."
Theodore Postol, a missile expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a longtime critic of President Bush's missile-defense programs, dismisses the idea that the incidents resulted from mistaken identity. He said differences in the speed, altitude and trajectory of combat aircraft and ballistic missiles make it impossible to confuse the two on radar.
"This is a serious command error at minimum. Somebody's head should roll," Postol said. "There's no excuse for this."
Details about the incidents are sketchy, but there are some clues.
After the shootdown of the British Tornado, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said "procedures and electronic means to identify friendly aircraft and to identify adversary aircraft ... broke down somewhere."
All allied aircraft carry an "Identification Friend or Foe" system. The IFF is similar to the electronic "transponders" that U.S. civilian aircraft carry to enhance their radar image, transforming that image from an unidentifiable blob to a sharp, data-laden icon on trackers' radar screens. The IFF in a military aircraft sends an encrypted, automatic response when detected by a radar signal.
Samson, of the Pentagon watchdog group, said it's possible that the Tornado's IFF wasn't working.
Postol said the British jet might have turned off its IFF or been flying at an angle in which its IFF signal was blocked. More likely, he said, was that the Tornado was flying outside a designated safe corridor reserved for friendly aircraft.
"My best guess is the Tornado was in the wrong place at the wrong time," Postol said.
That theory might have gained adherents when a Patriot radar later "painted," or began to track, a U.S. Air Force F-16, squashing speculation that the Tornado's IFF system may not have been compatible with U.S. air defenses. The U.S. fighter jet responded by firing a radar-seeking HARM missile that destroyed the Patriot battery's radar. No U.S. soldiers were injured, and the jet was not hit.
Army officials said that in the F-16 incident, the Patriot crew was taking cover from Iraqi artillery and had placed their system in automatic mode when their radar mistakenly identified the U.S. jet as a target.
Air Force Secretary James Roche said April 1 that the incident may have been caused by inexperienced pilots unfamiliar with operating near Patriot batteries. He said pilots hunting for Iraqi missile batteries are now required to check with surveillance aircraft or other ground radars before firing.
Air Force — as well as Navy, Marine and Army — pilots have long trained with Patriot batteries. And not always with good results.
During a combat identification exercise in March 2000 at Fort Stewart in Georgia, Patriots had difficulty distinguishing friendly from enemy aircraft. "We had issues with the Patriot," said a retired Air Force pilot, who spoke on condition his name not be used. "They 'shot down' an entire four-ship formation of F-16s and 'shot down' other aircraft."
That was an exercise, and no planes were actually hit. But the pilot noted that a Patriot almost shot down a U.S. tanker aircraft for real during the 1991 Gulf War. Disaster was averted only when the crew realized its mistake and detonated the missile in mid-flight. The retired pilot said Patriots are much more deadly than Iraqi surface-to-air missiles, which coalition aviators could out-maneuver. Without quick action by a Patriot's ground crew, it is virtually impossible to escape a Patriot in flight.
System 'didn't work'
Rushed into service during the 1991 Gulf War, the Patriot was designed to shoot down enemy aircraft but was modified hastily to take down Iraqi missiles.
The Army initially claimed high intercept rates. Later studies showed the system severely wanting. A General Accounting Office report estimated that 9% of Patriots hit their mark. Israelis determined that Patriots intercepted no more than one of the 39 Scuds launched at Israel by Iraq. Two years ago, former Defense secretary William Cohen declared, "The Patriot didn't work."
Since then, the Army has spent more than $3 billion to upgrade the system. Though the first Patriot missiles exploded near their targets, sending them off course, the newest PAC-3 model destroys incoming missiles by hitting them. It is not clear which of several generations of Patriot missiles were involved in the "friendly fire" incidents. Kadish said only four PAC-3s were fired in Iraq because they were in short supply when the war started.
All versions, however, use the same upgraded radar, which is supposed to allow crews to track and discern as many as 100 objects at a time.
Raytheon, the Patriot's prime contractor, said it is cooperating with the investigation and has referred all calls for comment to the Army. But spokesman Steve Brecken defended the contractor, saying, "The media is just assuming" that Patriots shot down the coalition fighters. "It hasn't been borne out yet. Everyone is jumping to conclusions."
Perhaps, but Samson said critics are likely to seize on the system's problematic performance in two Gulf Wars to argue that the Pentagon's larger missile defense program may be flawed.
"It's kind of a litmus test for missile defense as a whole," she said.
Contributing: Dave Moniz